Submissions

If you would like to write for or contribute to the monastery, please let us know. We support essays, op-eds, reviews, scholarly work and more.

Monastic scholars

The monastery supports and encourages scholarly work. Our interest is in supporting work that helps all of us think more clearly, or calls us to positive daily actions that improve or better humanity’s consciousness. This can range from historical observations to philosophical critiques, from psychological insights to research and studies, from the role of small, individual initiatives to larger, citizen-based movements, from the importance of sacred values to the timelessness of universal principles.

General Submission Guidelines

The Little Creek Monastery provides a free, web-based publication here on Medium, with frequent online articles and essays. We are inclusive and non-religious.

Our focus is on being an everyday life monk or nun, in the sense that society — at any level — can benefit from more and more people practicing a variety of disciplines to help improve human awareness, consciousness and a more social responsibility. Publication topics include practical insights on the deepening of consciousness, deeper experiences, class warfare, related opinion pieces, book reviews and scholarly works.

Features typically run 1500–5000 words; op-eds 500–1500 words; reviews 300–800 words — but we are open to longer pieces. We do not pay for articles.

• If you have an article idea, please query first before attempting to write it for us. If you already have a completed piece, just email it to us.
• You need to join Medium to write for us. It’s free. You do not need to be a paid Member — which gives you paywall content privileges.
• Before submitting, we recommend looking around our site(s) to get a sense of the kind of content we are interesting in promoting. You can start here or here.

Contributing Writers

Our main publishing site is A Monastery for Everyday Life. We organize all work by tabs. Once you hit Publish, a senior editor will categorize your piece and copy/file it in the elsewhere on the sit. For example, anything on the topic of Nothingness is eventually copy/pasted to The Library of Little Creek. We’ve created a stand-alone website for the monastery, in part to provide an improved organizational structure for our essays. Our aim in all this cross-referencing is to maximize exposure and make things easier to find later.

Note: If a writer routinely fails to abide by our guidelines, they will be removed from our publication.

Publishing Instructions

When you are ready to create a draft or to publish:

1. Next to the Publish button, you will see three dots (…). Select the three dots, and a dropdown will emerge. Then select Add to Publication>A Monastery for Everyday Life.
2. We have seven (7) tabs, but we deploy from a list of six (6). DO NOT use the About tag. We will delete the About tag if you happen to use it. Each of the site’s navigation tabs has an associated tag, listed below. You will need to select one:

• TAB: Essentials —practical examples of applying the martial arts in everyday life circumstances. The exact tag for this is: Jiu Jitsu
• TAB: Consciousness —covers all things consciousness and awareness, ranging from research, quantum physics, explorations of the mind, etc. The exact tag for this is: Consciousness
• TAB: Field Reports — accounts of experiences in consciousness or awareness. Tends to be first person. True. The exact tag for this is: Field Reports
• TAB: Monastery —covers mystics, mysticism, monks/nuns and all things monastic. The exact tag for this is: The Monastics
• TAB: Homilies — a general category, generally explained as Op/Ed pieces or even sermonettes (if you’re in the mood). The exact tag for this is: Homilies
• TAB: Scholarly —reserved for longer, more deeply researched pieces. The exact tag for this is: Scholarly

Tags

Your article will need to use one of the six tags shown above, and only one. That leaves you up to four tags, and you are free to add whatever tags you wish. But the site reserves one tag per piece, as we show above. Our six tags help to automate things. If your article is about Consciousness, then that’s the tag you’ll pick. So please pick one of the above anytime you publish. If you are unsure, select Homilies.

If you don’t select one of our tags, we will.

Heading/Title Standards

• Titles should use the larger of the two Title selections.
• A subtitle should immediately follow the title.
• Subtitles should be normal font, italicized.
• Subtitles can either be a tagline style, your name, or both.
• An image comes next. Please look at the site and strive for a visual effect that is comparable to what we typically post. Main rule: nothing garish. We reserve the right to remove or replace your pictures. We also reserve the right to add a picture if you don’t include one.
• Generally speaking, your image sizes should be at least 900px wide by any height. You can also refer to Medium’s recommended image sizes.
• The above standards keep the site looking consistent. Thanks for your help.

Article Content

• Articles must be in full — no summaries that link to full external articles.
• You are free to reference other work of your own or others.
• No blatant self promotion. However, you may plug your company, bio, work or links where they add value to the reader. Please do plugs at the bottom.
• We’re deeply grateful for your contribution and very much want to support you, but sometimes we all mess up. So, articles which we deem too short, awkwardly conveyed, poorly written or expressed are subject to being edited or subject to not being published.

Contact the Monastery

Use of Monastery Logos

Writers who contribute to the monastery are freely authorized to use our logos. We’d appreciate a link-back.